Monday, November 27, 2006

With the Thanksgiving holiday behind us (in the US), only a few weeks remain until the Q4 2006 release for r.a.d.controls. Here are some extra details regarding features we can expect to see in the upcoming Q4 release of r.a.d.controls for ASP.NET gleaned from the telerik forums:

New client-side row operations for r.a.d.grid.
This is a pretty big feature enhancement for grid that should come as a welcome addition for many developers. The new client-side features will allow developers to implement completely client-side row deletes (and possibly client-side inserts and updates) that will be persisted back to the server on the next PostBack/Callback. Vlad Enchev from the grid team posted a great blog entry on the upcoming feature here along with a link to a live demo of the delete feature.

Enhanced editor RealFontSize toolbar.
Anyone looking for more out-of-the-box power to choose your font units in editor should get a big productivity boost with the enhanced RealFontSize toolbar in Q4. The enhanced toolbar will supposedly deliver the ability to switch between relative, pixel, point and other font units with simple configuration file settings.

r.a.d.uploadto be integrated with r.a.d.editor
Developers using editor to upload files will no longer have to create a custom editor dialog to take full control of the upload process. The telerik team will be integrating r.a.d.upload into editor giving developer's complete access to the features exposed by the upload product, including the ProgressArea functionality.

r.a.d.spell will use the standard skinning mechanism
One of the changes we can expect to see in spell 3.0 (besides the new AJAX spell check mode) is the adoption of the "standard" telerik skinning mechanism. That means it should be very easy to change spell's skins in the future via the normal Skin property.

r.a.d.grid click on row to PostBack
If you've ever built an application with grid where you want users to click anywhere on the row to cause a PostBack, you'll know that that seemingly simple action requires a fair dose of custom Javascript and manual interaction with "__doPostBack". When Q4 ships, this task should finally be as easy as setting a single property on your grid instance.

Video tutorials for r.a.d.controls
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then telerik will be adding hundreds of thousands worth of words to the r.a.d.control help in Q4 with the formal introduction of video tutorials. These videos will allow developers to watch r.a.d.controls development in action and they will hopefully help answer a number of common questions. Are there any video tutorials you want to see?

Improved r.a.d.menu configuration wizard (maybe)
While the confirmation that menu's configuration wizard would be improved in Q4 was a little weak, there is some hope that the Q4 wizard will finally allow developers to re-order menu items. It seems like an obvious feature, especially since the grid wizard lets you reorder columns, so I hope that the team finds the time to get it into the release.

Word wrap for nodes in r.a.d.treeview (maybe)
This is another feature with weak commitment to the Q4 release, but if does make it it will allow long text on treeview nodes to wrap. According to members of the telerik community, this feature will be unique among many treeview controls and will further distance telerik's treeview from the competition.

Many new properties in r.a.d.window
There are a number of posts in the forums with references to features telerik wants to include in window's Q4 release. Among them are new client-side events that fire when a window is moved or re-sized, new properties that give developers access to a window's header and footer, a new MinimizeMode, a handful of new client-side API properties, a constrainable drag area for windows (unlikely that this feature will make it), and full use of Embedded Web Resources (for .NET 2). window is not a control slated for a "major" update in Q4, though, so it's possible many of these features could be cut if the dev teams run out of time.

Improved localization capabilities for all r.a.d.controls
Based on community feedback, telerik will be improving the way its localizable controls (editor, spell, upload, window, and calendar) handle localization. There is not much detail on pending improvements, but it is possible telerik will implement a feature that will enable the control to auto detect the current culture settings of an user and apply the correct localization settings.

The last release of 2006 is scheduled for mid-December, so we should start to see some betas in the next couple of weeks. When we do, I'll be sure to check for these features and let you know what you can expect to see in the final Q4 release. Which enhancements are you most looking forward to in the next release? Let me know in the comments and I'll pay extra attention.

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About Todd Anglin

To avoid sounding creepy, I won't describe myself in the 3rd (or even 4th) person. I am Telerik's Chief Evangelist and general all around "community guy." I started this blog as a customer, before joining the company, and now enjoy the best job in the world- helping deliver the good news of Telerik to people around the world and helping Telerik build cool, useful products. I am President of the North Houston .NET User Group, an O'Reilly author, and a Microsoft MVP.